ZUCKERMAN BOUND by Philip Roth
Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 784 pages $22.50 hardcover, $9.95 paperback
Nathan Zuckerman made his debut in Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer (1979); the hero was an earnest young author in the process of learning that art and life issued contradictory demands. By the time of Zuckerman Unbound (1981), Nathan had become absurdly rich and famous, thanks to a scandalous best-selling novel that estranged him from his father and the rest of his family. Zuckerman's punishment came in The Anatomy Lesson (1983), in which he appeared as a neurasthenic wreck hoping to start life all over again as a medical student.
Zuckerman Bound offers the convenience of all three novels in one volume and something else besides. Roth has added a novella-length epilogue to Nathan's saga called The Prague Orgy. For reasons he does not fully understand, a ( rejuvenated Zuckerman finds himself in Czechoslovakia, trying to obtain a manuscript of Yiddish stories, written by someone both unknown and deceased, to take back with him to the U.S. The writers and artists he meets in Prague have all been silenced and repressed by the government. Sex is their outlet and anodyne. Zuckerman wants to discuss literature; his hosts want him to join in the fun. Anomalies multiply, while the American's mission rapidly descends toward fiasco.
The Prague Orgy is a fitting capstone to Roth's trilogy, an achievement that seems even more impressive whole than it did piecemeal. Zuckerman Bound proves that no one now writing can be funnier and, at the same time, more passionately serious than Philip Roth.
LAST LETTERS FROM HAV
by Jan Morris
Random House; 203 pages; $14.95
In an epilogue to Journeys, published
last year, Travel Writer Jan Morris said her valedictory to cities. "I may go upstream," she wrote airily, "or strike into the mountains." Yet here she is on the shadowy streets of a once grand Mediterranean trading and resort metropolis, "a little compendium of the world's experience, historically, aesthetically, even perhaps spiritually."
At every turn, Hav's storybook past collides with the neon present. The annual Roof Race, Europe's oddest sporting event, sends multinational Havians sprinting across the peeling ruins left by Athenian, Czarist and British occupations. Noel Coward and Nijinsky played here in Hav's heyday; Nazis hid out among its elite residents. Present-day Havians are baffling shadows. The last pretender to the Turkish caliphate, a principal shareholder in Hav TV, tries to marry Morris to his vizier. She sips coffee with a Chinese financial pirate and recognizes a bartender at the opulent casino from his days at Harry's Bar in Venice. "I know of nowhere in the world," she writes, "where the purpose of life seems so ill-defined."
In the end, Hav's delicious essence remains as elusive as its geography. Although Morris keeps a straight phrase, Hav is not discernible in any atlas or gazetteer. Look for it about halfway between Oz and Lilliput.
FALL FROM GRACE
by Larry Collins
Simon & Schuster; 475 pages; $17.95